In this frame grab from video provided by WPLG-TV, law enforcement personnel arrest an unidentified man (in dark red), following a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2018.

Editor’s note: This article is part of a series on gun violence. Read another perspective here.

In the aftermath of particularly horrific mass shootings, or any tragedy for that matter, reasoned, sober analysis is often hard to come by. With the way media and the internet work these days, emotions, agendas and agendas fueled by emotions are on full display no matter where you look.

On the internet, personally-held beliefs and biases are readily enforced, misinformation is often taken as fact and almost immediately everyone can become a self-professed expert on gun policy, mass shootings and so on at the click of a button.

Within hours of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, you could see grotesque nonsense peddling from all along the political spectrum in response.

From the far-right, it was suggested that the shooter was an affiliate of the far-left activist group Antifa, or that he was an undocumented immigrant, a DACA recipient or a Dreamer. People concerned with basic, nonpartisan fact-checking should now know that none of these noxious claims is true.

More credibly sounding, but maybe even more pernicious, is the idea promoted by mainstream media outlets like ABC and CBS that there have been 18 school shootings in the United States this year. The factoid, which has taken off with people inclined to support gun control, is simply false.

The figure, which came from pro-gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety, includes incidents like the Jan. 3 suicide of a man in the parking lot of a school that hadn’t been open for seven months.

According to the Washington Post, just five of the shootings out of the 18 cited by the group actually happened while school was in session and resulted in injuries. Any school shooting is obviously terrible, and that there have been five school shootings resulting in injury and/or death is a problem, but apparently the truth isn’t enough.

Another idea that took off, especially after President Trump raised the issue of mental health, is the idea that Trump made it easier for people with mental health problems to obtain firearms. As with the 18 school shootings idea, it sounds real, especially if you just read headlines and are looking for confirmation of your own beliefs. But the truth is more complicated.

At issue is an Obama administration rule requiring the Social Security Administration to submit the names of everyone who receives disability benefits and needs help to manage their benefits because of a mental impairment to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

Disability rights groups, the National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union, which very much supports gun control, opposed the rule. “There is no data to support a connection between the need for a representative payee to manage one’s Social Security disability benefits and a propensity toward gun violence,” argued the ACLU in support of legislation overturning the rule.

The rule was overturned last year. But now, apparently, it has suddenly morphed from an ill-conceived rule wrongly discriminating against people who need help managing their disability benefits to the idea that Donald Trump is letting mentally disturbed people buy guns because he is basically Hitler. Or something like that.

It’s a serious problem that so many people can fall for outright false ideas and use false ideas to inform their approach to a significant problem like gun violence and mass shootings.

Lastly, at some point, it has to made clear that, as much as people like to call for bans of “assault weapons,” there is no actual definition for assault weapon because assault weapon isn’t an actual category of firearm. Hence, calling for banning guns which sort of look like something someone in the military might use isn’t really all that helpful.

As Mother Jones has reported, two-thirds of mass shootings from 1982-2012 involved handguns versus 14 percent involving guns which could be considered assault weapons. Handguns consistently account for the vast majority of gun homicides in general — 7,105 victims in 2016 versus 374 for rifles of any kind.

Pretending that banning the poorly defined “assault rifles” will save us from gun violence might sound nice and easy, but it misses the mark, perhaps because the logical extension of banning guns to save lives would just lead to mass gun confiscations few would tolerate.

Fortunately, we have time to reflect and take more calculated approaches, hopefully informed by fact-checked data, to reducing gun violence and mass shootings.

Sal Rodriguez is an editorial writer and columnist for the Southern California News Group. He may be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com

Sal Rodriguez joined the Editorial Board in 2014. He got his start in journalism investigating the abuse of solitary confinement in American prisons and jails with Solitary Watch, and has been published by a variety of publications including The Guardian and Mother Jones. He is a graduate of Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

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